In its Liturgy the Roman Church has always insisted on ‘Uniformity’, but even today there are a few local exceptions. One of the most interesting of these, the rite of the archdiocese of Braga, in the northwest of Portugal, has attracted very little external interest, but it has many points that repay study.

The surviving continuous records of the Court of Arches, or, to give it its full modern style, the ‘beloved Court of Canterbury of the Arches’, tell its history only from the Restoration. It had already been respected for centuries as the chief ecclesiastical court of the province of Canterbury and a large number of suits continued to come before it every year. The judge or Official Principal, commonly known as the Dean of the Arches from his lesser office as judge in the archbishop of Canterbury's peculiar of that name, was a person of considerable influence and importance. The proctors and advocates who conducted the cases were the more successful members of a flourishing profession. In the early eighteenth century, Thomas Oughton, the writer on ecclesiastical law, who was a proctor of the court, spoke of it with awe and veneration. ‘Let us reverently enter on one of the court days into the sanctuary of this august tribunal. … Behold! How solemn, how awakening the aspect of justice! … At first glance who is not penetrated with emotions of affection and veneration!’ But the court was shorn of most of its jurisdiction during the nineteenth century and it was described by Dickens in 1850 with very different feelings. The society of Doctors' Commons, the stronghold of the profession of the ecclesiastical law, was dissolved in accordance with the Court of Probate Act of 1857 and its buildings were pulled down.

Sixteenth century England saw a good deal of discontent with the education provided by the universities. Not only churchmen but also statesmen and schoolmasters felt the need for something more than the courses then provided. Cranmer first suggested (1540) the need for a nursery: ‘in every cathedral there should be provision made for readers of divinity, and of Greek and Hebrew; and a great number of students, to be exercised in the daily worship of God, and trained up in study and devotion’. Sir Humphrey Gilbert (1539?–83) outlined a scheme for Queene Elizabethes Achademy which was to educate her ‘Maiestes Wardes and others the youth of nobility and gentlemen’. The universities were unable at that time to do this work, Gilbert maintained, and special training was needed for those laymen who looked forward in due time to sharing in the government of their country. And for schoolmasters, Mulcaster made a like proposal (1580): ‘He that will not allow of this careful provision for such a seminary of masters, is most unworthy either to have a good master himself, or hereafter to have a good one for his. Why should not teachers be well provided for, to continue their whole life in the school, as divines, lawyers, physicians do in their several professions’. In 1556 cardinal Pole invented the word ‘seminary’ which has had such a powerful influence in educational history. It was adopted at the seventh session of the Council of Trent in 1563 when the Council devoted itself, with great success, to the provision of diocesan seminaries throughout the Roman Church. Thirtysix seminaries were founded by 1626.

It was as a breath of fresh air that the first news of the debates at Salters' Hall came to a young minister in a remote country village in Somerset, where he had found asylum because he had deviated slightly from the received Calvinism of his day and been made to feel the oppressiveness of the orthodox atmosphere of Dissenting congregations in the neighbouring county of Devon. When the news came he had recently seen two of the four Exeter ministers, James Peirce and Joseph Hallett ejected by the Trustees from the city meeting houses as the result of what seemed to him a vendetta led by a certain John Ball, minister at Honiton. It is with evident exhilaration, therefore, that on the first news of the Salters' Hall debates he wrote to a friend:

‘Mr. [Ball]'s conduct with respect to Mr. Peirce and Mr. Hallet, will render him infamous throughout the kingdom. … Blessed be God, that he has stirred up such a noble spirit of Christian liberty in London: where it was carried in a meeting of above an hundred ministers, at Salters-Hall, that no human tests, articles, or interpretations should be urged as the trial of a man's orthodoxy; and that no minister should be condemned as heterodox, or an heretick, unless he taught, &c. contrary to express scripture. This was the substance of one part of their determination.’

One chapter of John Newton's life has been consistently overlooked by his biographers. It concerns his friendship with Thomas Haweis, the Evangelical whose importance students of eighteenth century English Church History are now beginning to realise. The influence of Whitefield, of Wesley, of Grimshaw upon Newton in his early and formative years has been amply recognised. The name of Haweis scarcely appears at all. Neither Richard Cecil, who continued Newton's own Authentic Narrative and also provided the prefatory memoir to his collected works, nor Josiah Bull, who in 1868 compiled what has remained the standard biography for more than three-quarters of a century, pay any real attention to Haweis. Nor does Bernard Martin's recent full-length portrait repair the omission. There are, it is true, several references to Haweis (though the index does not even succeed in spelling his name correctly), but no indications that the author is aware of the important rôle he played.

When the Wellington government translated Blomfield from Chester to London in 1828, he came to a diocese where pastoral superintendence had long ceased to bear any relation to the needs of the people. As early as 1811, 75,624 people lived in St. Marylebone, but the parish church had room for only 900 of them. Twenty years later, Baptist Noel computed that, owing to the deficiency of church accommodation, about one-third of the million and a half of the inhabitants of London were living ‘without any Christian instruction and without any public acknowledgement of God’. In 1834, in the north and north-east of London, there were only ten parishes for 353,460 people.